For the free-market right, that’s the end of the discussion: Workers are free. No one’s forcing them to work. If they don’t like a job, they can leave it.
For the socialist left, it’s more complicated. Workers are not in fact free, the left argues, but the source of their unfreedom is not to be found in the usual guise. The most important constraint upon the freedom of contract is not the discrete or formal acts of coercion by power-holders (what political scientists sometimes call the first face of power), which are embodied in law and enforced by the state. Rather, it is systemic inequality and disparities of power between labor and capital....Corey Robin
Not Even a Bourgeois Freedom: Freedom of Contract in John Roberts’s America
The phrase, "systemic inequality and disparities of power between labor and capital," says it in a nutshell. It's about institutional power, which is masked by the bogus narrative of individualism as the basis of economic liberalism.
No comments:
Post a Comment